Opinion by: Venket Naga, co-founder and CEO of Serenity
The synergies between cryptocurrencies and the real estate market have shifted substantially in the last few years. Purchasing properties with crypto-backed loans evolved from groundbreaking news to the baseline.
There is a growing intersection between crypto and real-world assets (RWAs), and the possibilities are abundant.
Whether it’s Dubai’s first tokenized real estate project in MENA, the world’s largest $3-billion RWA tokenization deal or first-time investments, tokenization efforts are too high-profile to disregard the trajectory of this sector.
This trajectory is set for further growth, with the forecast that $4 trillion of the real estate market will have been tokenized by 2035. With real estate tokenization progressing at bullet-train speeds, the market is shifting to a democratized dynamic accessible to all types of investors, no matter how large or small their capital is.
A subtle, unanswered question could critically halt this trajectory: Who inherits these assets when the owner dies?
As a bedrock of traditional property law, inheritance could prove to be a point of failure for real-world assets if its logic is not scaled to blockchain technology.
Possible solutions for the inheritance dilemma
The absence of a standardized, legally recognized succession mechanism is becoming a risk vector growing as rapidly as blockchain-based ownership in real estate.
While much attention has been paid to regulatory compliance, with frameworks like Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Regulation being created, inheritance, one of the fundamental pillars of property rights, remains strangely omitted from the regulatory conversation.
Granted, the traditional court-recognized inheritance mechanism may not be suitable for the tokenized real estate industry, but without a digitized version, heirs face black-box custodianship, ambiguous jurisdictional claims or permanent loss of high-value assets.
As an afterthought, the question of inheritance could be answered…
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